What it feels like, oddly, is tears. The pain behind your eyes just before you start crying; the word “ache” suddenly seems so poetically correct. You spend a few days hoping it’s because you had to do things alone when you wanted help, but then you don’t really need help and the ache goes on even when you’re treated royally. Holding back the tears. You spend a few weeks trying different movements, trying to find out where it is specifically, this sharp ache that emerges not here and not there but is a lightning bolt when it hits. Your mind scurries down corridors of dread, rattling the handles of worst case scenarios and confronting mortality which is easier than confronting the slow tedious changes you might have to make to everyday life. You try alternatives and emerge bruised and bloodied, wondering if the pain is less or merely less comparatively. There was a Czech film where a man tries to cure his wife of her personality with electricity. Would that work? Probably not but also you’d probably try it. In the end it’s the simple fact of aging, which you knew about already. It’s less excess, it’s slower movement, no more reading in bed, an increase in the gentleness you show yourself. Some body parts weren’t meant to live as long as others and every day is a gift. See, that’s not so bad, is it. 

Being home is good. I read an article, doubtless sponsored by a travel agency, that said that travel was like therapy in that you get to see that the way you are currently living your life is not the only way, and you return from travel ready to try applying some of those different ways. Probably not a travel agency, do those even exist anymore. An airline maybe. But it’s true. I came home after two months away from home ready to be a new and improved version of myself, not so much because I’d seen a different way of doing things, although I had. I’d seen many. More like because I saw that I could adapt to many different ways of being Anne, Anne who visits different lives, and Why Not try adapting to being a better version of myself, given that I am adaptable. I came home, got over jet lag by saying I didn’t have time for it (the health monitor says I owe eight hours of sleep, I assume I owe it to myself, which is pretty much what I lost, so… yay). Overdoses of melatonin. Magnesium, benadryl, xanax. I think it’s funny how much we complain about “daylight saving time” and then I voluntarily do it to myself nine times at once, four times a year now. Anyway I came home and immediately sprang forward into life, which was made quite easy by the fact that the weather was very spring-like, blue skies and sunshine and whatnot.

What I feel aware of recently is this veil, this membrane, between who I am and who I want to be. It’s so thin, I can see me through it, and I imagine I’m happier, healthier. It’s such a small jump. I can’t do it. I can do it; I don’t. I stay in bed too long, I look at my phone, I think about things and don’t write them down and they float away like soap bubbles, as if I hadn’t thought them at all. I make lists and don’t refer back to them. There’s something lost on the follow. I want to be better but not enough to do it.

I make a massive grocery order to restock my tiny kitchen with the staples I’d cleared out before I left. I buy the ingredients to eat a healthy cholesterol-lowering breakfast: nuts, fruit, oatmeal, real maple syrup to make it fun. I look firmly at the ingredients while I fry the same egg I have had for breakfast every day for twenty years. I prep cook a healthy lunch for four days and figure that’s worth something. I count my rosary of the twenty-three people I’m pretty sure love me. I double some names because I’m quite sure of them. I bet they’d love me even more if I was better. Were better. Kinder, more attentive, more reading of paper and less of electronics. It has occured to me that I never count myself on that list. Oh but this is quite maudlin.

I am glad to be home. Glad for sunlight. Glad for the little neighbor who said “Hello” to me today when we passed on the street. Glad for a man I haven’t seen in 12 years and we high fived each other as we walked past, which is the same thing we did 12 years ago. Glad for grocery delivery, both real and aspirational. I’m glad to come home to my books and my bed and my plans large and small.

In the morning they bring coffee and cake to the door. We drink the coffee with milk and sit in separate rooms and solve puzzles until we feel social, well I feel social but I practice being patient and write this instead. As Herman Hesse wrote, “I can think, I can wait, I can fast.” I eat the cake, though.

Then we go out into the world where I have to do the dance in my head of staying quiet or telling my origin story over and over again because for some people how I got where I am is the most interesting thing about me. It is not the most interesting thing about me but it is the answer to the question they always ask. My sister is patient as I answer it again.

We drink wine and talk about minerals and fruit, soil and stones, and where to go next. We try to make good small talk. Someone has a Tesla in the parking lot and I’ll admit I want to leave. I’m not very good at withholding judgment. Later we buy books at a small bookstore until I feel rebalanced.

Some people seem like zombies. Some people seem to be listening to someone screaming all the time, worry strobing across their face. Some people seem completely normal. 

In the afternoon the sun is warm and we swim in mineral water until our fingers turn to raisins. The bites on my legs are healing, bonus. My shoulder isn’t better but it isn’t worse and I practice moving it under water, weightless. I don’t know how we are supposed to be. All empires fall. In Athens thousands of years ago someone was pressing olives, someone made a wall carving, and Aristophanes wrote comedies, as the golden age ended.

This is a story I am telling for someone else and it’s about someone else but I’ll probably creep in, being me. In this story, the person who commissioned the tale (sometimes called the “patron”) – the patron saint – has a thing that they do obsessively. If it were bad we would call it an addiction but it is not bad so we don’t. Every day, several times a day, sitting in a cafe or a museum or at a table while waiting for other people to get their shit together (that’s me, sometimes called a “cameo”). Then we gather all the things together and take them to the next place. Sometimes other people partake, me (again) consistently, but also lately a friend in Antarctica which makes for interesting images. I don’t know why I’m being coy. My traveling companion is an artist and a relentless correspondent who makes and writes postcards, and when we travel together I also write postcards, which is fun. Then we go to the post office and try to mail them, which I submit is not fun but she thinks it is. She wanted me to write about one post office and the very nice postal worker who gave us peel-and-stick stamps and was very helpful in general but I am not a good commissioned artist, I am not compliant even when I like the orders so I will tell here instead how she tried to give stamps to another postcard addict and wound up crying because when you meet someone who loves things you love it can break your heart open a little in a very sweet way. Then we mailed 30 completed postcards (2 were mine) and went to a museum and bought more postcards and also some pretty paper and went to a cafe and wrote to people near and far that we are thinking of them, and then I wrote this, which is the pure and simple truth.

Through the magic of the internet I’ve been watching people who are neurodivergent or “neurodivergent” (meaning they think they are but don’t have a diagnosis) and some of it has been interesting. One thing they talk about is masking vs. being authentic. I’m currently on an airplane and the little girl behind me has kicked the seat pretty relentlessly for 9 hours and grasped the back of my seat and pulled my hair in the process several times. I know she is a kid, I believe that plane travel is difficult for everyone and especially children, and I have empathy for the mother deciding that letting the kid make me uncomfortable (surely she knows) is a reasonable price to be seated next to someone who is not currently screaming. But this is how a lot of the “authentic self” talk feels to me: like permission to do what feels natural at the expense of making other people uncomfortable. And part of my response to that is irritation on two levels — first, that I don’t like having my seat kicked and second, that I regularly choose to sit with my own discomfort so as not to make others uncomfortable, and isn’t that the price of being among others? There’s a certain lack of empathy in this that I don’t like. That you can need to self soothe in ways that are obvious I guess I understand but once it’s disruptive to others… Maybe you don’t get to do those things, if you literally can’t do them without your comfort meaning someone else’s discomfort. 

I don’t mean discomfort like that when I’m in a museum and there’s someone in a corner sort of quietly rocking back and forth or “stimming” as the kids these days say, cause I understand art can be overwhelming and I think everyone should be able to explore that edge where the beauty of it is too much. 

But like, moaning loudly in a restaurant to the point that I can’t hear my dining companion is discomfort that I consider unacceptable. Restaurants are not a necessity. 7

Of course with airplanes it’s important to remember that the reason we’re all uncomfortable is a choice by corporate airlines to make people less comfortable by making seats closer together, thinner, etc. and I curse this compromise of our space in the same breath that I celebrate that we now have flights affordable enough that children can even be on the plane. I was once a parent conveying a child across an ocean and a continent and it ain’t cheap, I know. 

But I also wish that the way we acknowledge our own inconvenience could be expanded to consider the inconvenience of others. Like if the mother could at least point out to the child that she’s pulling my hair and that’s not nice? Could we all compromise our authenticity and even our own comfort a little, in the interest of continuing to occupy the same spaces? 

Part 2, coming later (maybe): nobody is impressed by how quickly you got the suitcase out of the overhead bin and stood in line, anxiety-masking weirdo. You don’t need to worry THAT much about other people.